“Okay,” he says, bracing himself against the table as the boat rocks on the swell, “I don’t see any helicopters, or not yet anyway—when they do the drop they’re going to close off the island, and if we don’t hustle out there, who knows how long before some Park Service honcho comes along and tells us we can’t land at all.” He hefts one of the backpacks experimentally. “Oh, and we’re going to need to fit everything in just two of the packs.” He glances at Anise, then drops his eyes. “The wind’s up, baby. You’re going to have to stay aboard. Like we discussed.”
“Uh-uh. No way.”
“Sorry.”
“Shit,” she explodes, jerking her pack across the table as if it’s come to sudden vicious life before snatching it up and slamming it to the floor. “I don’t want to be cooped up in here while you’re out there, I don’t know, doing things. I want to do my part. Why you think I even came?”
This is the kind of thing that goes right by him, because there aren’t going to be any arguments, not here, not today, and he doesn’t bother to answer. He props his own pack between table and bench, folding back the flap to expose the interior, which, he sees, is a little better than half-full. Without looking up, he bends wordlessly to retrieve her pack and invert it over his. There’s a dry rattle as the tablets tick against the nylon interior, Wilson gliding forward to offer up his own pack so as to balance out the load. When they’re done, when they’ve shrugged into the packs and adjusted their identical black baseball caps—Anise’s idea, as are the black jeans and hoodies, a way of confusing their identities in the event anyone should spot them on the trail—he digs out a tube of sunblock and extends it to her. “It’s not fair,” she mutters, squirting a dab of the stuff in one palm and leaning forward to work it into his face and neck in a firm circular motion, her hands cold, fingers wooden, making her displeasure known.
What can he say? That he’s sorry, that he’ll make it up to her, that someone has to be in charge? That life is imperfect? That’s she’s not in kindergarten anymore and neither is he? He gets to his feet while she’s still applying the stuff, impatient, nervous now, in danger of losing it, and all he can say is, “If the boat breaks anchor, you just start the engine and keep her away from the rocks till we get back. All right? You got it?”
Then they’re in the dinghy, the waves jarring them like incoming rounds even though they’re in the lee of the boat, and Anise is handing down the backpacks while he yanks at the starter cord on the little 20-horsepower Merc, thinking Please God, do not let them get wet. Not now. Not after all this. He can picture the thing flipping, the vividest image, the shock of the water, the crippling waves, he and Wilson clawing and blowing while the swamped boat slews away from them, a thousand bucks’ worth of vitamin K2 spread across the bottom of the bay and every rat on the island bleeding out its mouth and ears and anus. The wind tastes like failure, like defeat and humiliation. It’s over, he’s thinking, over before we start. But Wilson is sure-handed, Anise adept, and the engine catches on the second try. He shifts into gear as the dinghy drifts free on a whiff of exhaust, twists the accelerator and noses the boat toward shore.
Because of the cliffs, the only place to land is at the dock, where they’ll be plainly visible, but the dock is deserted and the sky is closing in, and he wonders if the Park Service will risk flying their helicopters in weather like this. Maybe not. Maybe he and Wilson can get out in advance of the poisoners, give the rats a head start. Save them. Rescue them. Champion them. Nobody else is going to do it, that’s for sure, nobody but him and Wilson and Anise, FPA, For the Protection of Animals. All animals, big and small. No exceptions. The wind’s in his face, flapping the hood of the sweatshirt round his throat, the dock coming up fast—action, he’s taking action while all the rest of them just sit around and whine—and he can feel the giddiness rising in him, the surge of power and triumph that rides up out of nowhere to replace the bafflement and rage and depression Dr. Reiser and his pharmaceuticals can’t begin to touch. This is who he is. This.
There are something like a hundred and fifty steps up the cliff and onto the plateau above, and his hours on the StairMaster hold him in good stead here, he and Wilson climbing stride for stride and flinging out handfuls of kibble and rat vitamins as they go, taking pains to hit even the most inaccessible spots, and so what if the tabs tend to dribble down the rock faces? No place is off-limits to a rat. When they get to the top—humped and treeless, nothing in sight but the lighthouse and a couple of whitewashed outbuildings, one of which features a plaque that says Ranger Residence—they decide to split up, Wilson taking the loop trail to the right and he to the left. “Okay,” he says, the wind beating at him and the blood surging through him till he feels as if he could take right off and hover overhead with the gulls, “remember to hit the cliffs all along the way, not just the trail—”
Wilson is watching him from beneath the pulled-down brim of his cap, looking as if he’s just heard a good joke. Or told one. “Yeah, you already said that. About six hundred times.”
“And we’ll meet in the middle”—the trail was an easy hike, mainly flat, two miles or less—“and cut across on a diagonal, just to make sure we cover as much territory as we can.”
Wilson holds his grin, brings one fist up for a knuckle-to-knuckle rap of solidarity, and then they’re going their separate ways. The sun is in retreat now, the clouds twined across the horizon to the north like weathered rope, the wind coming in gusts strong enough to rake the pellets out of his hand, and before long he’s tossing the stuff as high as he can and letting the wind do the work. It’s exhilarating. Like being a kid at play. The vitamin tabs are a pale yellow, the kibble rust-colored, blood-colored, and he doesn’t want to know what it’s composed of, doesn’t want to think of offal, bone, the leavings of the slaughterhouse floor—it’s enough to watch the stuff fly from his hand to loop and twist away from him like confetti.
Up the path, head down against the wind. And what if it rains? Will they postpone the drop? Will the vitamins dissolve, the kibble rot, stink, fester? He doesn’t know enough about the properties of either compound to make that determination—besides which, it’s too late to go back now. And even if the mix does break down, the most likely scenario has the rats eating it anyway—they’re rats, after all, born to scrounge and hoard and eat till their stomachs swell like balloons—and it’ll stay with them, fat-soluble, buried deep in their tissues. Who knows, maybe they’ll find it so satisfying they’ll ignore the cascade of blue pellets the Park Service plans to unleash on them. That’s what he’s thinking as he makes his way along the ridge, detouring when necessary to heave the mixture right out to the edge of the cliffs, lost in the rhythm of it—clutch, lift, release—and he begins to feel better, begins to think everything will work out after all. He’s in the moment, breathing deep, working his legs, the scent of coastal sage in his nostrils, birds hovering, lizards licking along ahead of him. Before long, he finds he’s actually enjoying himself, twenty million people strung along the coast across from him and the island as deserted as it was when it rose up out of the sea. Except for Wilson, of course. And whatever Park Service types came out on that boat. And—lest he forget—the resident ranger, who’s no doubt sitting on his ass in his little white house with a view to die for, reading crime novels, boiling spaghetti, blinding himself with gin.
He’s off the path now—clutch, lift, release—thinking of the almost unimaginable degree of evil it must take to be a scientist in some big chemical company lab, Monsanto, Dow, Amvac, devoting all your talent and energy, your whole life, to coming up with a compound as deadly as brodifacoum and finding just the right mix of ingredients to make it irresistible, a kind of rat candy, rat cocaine, when his feet get tangled in the brush and the air goes suddenly still. It happens so fast he can’t get a grasp on it, the cracked and veined earth vanishing beneath the thrust of his elbows as he pitches forward, dust in his eyes and the stones sifting away from him, flying stones, stones raking down the
length of the chasm that opens up before him like a movie gone to wide-screen. Warning: The cliffs are unstable. Stay on the path. And then what’s beneath him, beneath his torso and flailing legs, is going too, dropping away, and he with it. There’s a brief moment of weightlessness and the panic that seizes him with an electric jolt, and then the blow he catches from the ledge ten feet down.
He lands on his right side, on his rib cage, the air punched out of him and the backpack wrenched askew. At first he knows nothing, and then what does he know? That he has fallen from the cliff, the unstable cliff, the friable, loosely compacted and stony cliff, and that he has not plummeted—that’s the word that comes to him, a word he wouldn’t use in any other context—to his death. On the rocks below. Where the sea, riding in on the swell of the storm, thrashes and foams and pulverizes. For a long moment, he’s unable to move. And then, like a cat waking from sleep, he flexes each of his muscles in turn, reacquainting himself with the mode of their functioning, thinking, Anise isn’t going to believe this, thinking, What if I have to be rescued? What if the helicopter, the Park Service helicopter, the poisoners’ helicopter—?
The ledge, this projection of volcanic rock bristling with the spikes of xerophytic plants that has broken his fall—saved him—is one of many, a series of jagged battlements projecting from the cliffs as if to impede an invasion. He sees this, can trace the pattern that is no pattern at all up and down the rock face in both directions, as he very gingerly shifts his weight. It takes him a moment, forty-two years old and with high blood pressure and a knifing pain in his right side, before he’s able to work his feet beneath him and rise, inch by staggered inch, hugging the rock. When he’s fully erect and can see above him to the place where the ground gave way, he becomes aware of the shag of plants to the near side of him, Dudleya mostly, succulents that would snap in two, pull right out, send him plummeting, but something with a woody stem too, Ceanothus or scrub oak maybe, right there, just inside the limit of his reach. He takes hold of it. Tries it. And then, pressing himself so close to the rock that he will later find pebbles, sand, bits of leaf and twig worked under his belt and into the seams of his underwear, he lifts himself, snatching at the next handhold while the toes of his hiking boots dig for traction. Twenty seconds later he’s on top, his legs churning at the loose dirt, the pack binding, his blood howling in his ears, and then he’s safe, scrambling fifty feet into the brush before he collapses.
The next thing he remembers is looking at his watch. And this is the astonishing thing—only five minutes have elapsed. Five minutes. Not an hour, just five minutes, three hundred seconds, from what seemed certain death to resurrection. He is sweating, though the wind is cold, the T-shirt beneath the hoodie wet through. There’s a deep blue bruise on the back of his right hand. His ribs ache. But he gets to his feet, digs out his plastic water bottle for a long hissing squeeze of the filtered water from the reverse-osmosis tank he installed in the kitchen at home, aqua vita, then tucks it away and starts back up the trail, mechanically scattering pellets. The decision has already been made: he will tell no one, not Anise or Wilson or Dr. Reiser, about what has just happened. Or almost happened. Why should he? He feels like enough of an idiot as it is, and as he settles back into his rhythm—clutch, lift, release—he can’t help wondering how much more an idiot he would have felt if he’d had to have been rescued. Or worse: a posthumous idiot, splayed on the rocks with a crushed skull and his hips reverted, forever a totem of the Park Service, just like the pygmy mammoth. Remember that clown? What was his name? The one that splattered himself all over the rocks trying to spread vitamin K?
Despite the sweatshirt, he’s begun to shiver by the time he spots Wilson coming along the trail toward him. The sky is uniformly dark now, the wind stronger, colder, the brush whipping, bits of chaff and seed beating past him on gusts that seem to come from every direction at once. He keeps pitching handfuls of the vitamin mix into the air, though he’s beginning to understand that there will be no drop today, no helicopters hovering overhead, no rats bloodied, no authorities to dodge or confront. He’s thinking he should have paid more attention to the weather report, should have been more flexible—but then he’s the kind of person who makes a plan and sticks to it, which is why he’s been so successful in business, never crap out, never say die, never, above all, admit you’re wrong. Wilson, loping along, his right arm shooting out rhythmically to toss one handful after another of the mix over his shoulder, gives him a grin as he closes on him. “How’s it?” he calls when they’re still twenty feet apart. “You got any stuff left? Because I’m just about out.”
They stand there together a moment, backs to the wind, and Wilson digs a pack of cigarettes out of his inside pocket. “Freakin’ cold, eh?” Wilson says. “They say the weather’s changeable out here, but this is”—he tucks a cigarette into the corner of his mouth, cups a hand and puts the lighter to it—“this is brutal. You know it was going to be like this? I mean, could you even guess?”
He’s not complaining, just commiserating in the way of a comradeat-arms. “Yeah, colder than shit,” is all Dave can manage in response, though he appreciates the sentiment. The shock of the fall is fading, and no, he’s not going to mention it, not now, not ever. It’s like when he used to play football in high school—somebody blindsides you, you just get up and walk it off. The coach’s face comes to him then, a joyless ego-glutted overworked sinkhole of a face above a gray sweatshirt and a shining silver whistle on a red lanyard. Walk it off. That’s what the coach would say, even if you’d separated your shoulder or dislocated your knee.
Wilson looks to the sky from beneath the pulled-down brim of the baseball cap. “I don’t know, man—feels like rain to me.”
“Yeah. Me too. But at least it’s going to keep the bastards out of the sky. At least for today.”
“I was wondering,” Wilson says, kicking the toe of one boot into the dirt at his feet, the smoke of the cigarette torn from his fingers, his eyes squinted against the blow, “if, you know, it does rain, like what is that going to do to this stuff? What if it really rains. I mean, like buckets, like the monsoon, because it’s that time of year, you know. Are we wasting our time here? Is this all just going to wash away?”
If it is, he’s not about to admit it. “Nah, I don’t think so. And the fact that they’re obviously not going to do the drop is okay too. It gives the animals a chance to store up, and even if the stuff gets wet, they’re not going to care. You don’t think a rat’s that particular, do you?”
Wilson just shrugs. He’s looking out across the water to where the horizon dissolves in a cauldron of cloud. “Shit, I don’t know—that’s your department. You’re in charge, you tell me.” A drag on the cigarette, the butt end glowing. “You’re the one that wanted to come out here, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay, well here we are, so let’s stop gassing like a pair of old grannies in their rocking chairs and get this over with so I can sit by that heater you got and crack the champagne. Long live the rats, right?”
It takes another half hour to cover the plateau, he and Wilson branching out at a forty-five-degree angle, the wind, if anything, getting worse. When he’s done, when the backpack is empty and his fingers numb and his ribs throbbing as if he’s being kicked with each step he takes, he makes his way back to the trailhead to find Wilson there waiting for him, hunkered down on the steps with a paperback and another smoke. “We out of here?” Wilson asks, glancing up at him. “Yeah,” he says, and then they’re both bouncing down the steps, the cove expanding beneath them to reveal the Park Service boat still tied up to the buoy, and the Paladin—not that he was worried—still at anchor, nose to the wind and the waves streaming round it like creases on a sheet.
It isn’t till they get halfway down to the landing dock that they spot the figure there, a man in a teal shirt with his back to them, busy going up and down the ladder to secure his gear in a white Zodiac inflatable tied up next to the dinghy. Since th
ere’s only one other boat in the cove and only somebody escaped from the asylum would take that thing across the channel in weather like this, he has to conclude that the man is attached to the Park Service boat. “Don’t look now,” Wilson says, but he’s already shushing him. “No worries,” he says, striding across the dock as if the man on the ladder doesn’t exist.
Up close—and the guy turns around on them now, as if he can sense their presence, or, more likely, feel the reverberations of their tread radiating along the boards of the dock—he’s startled by the certainty that he’s seen him somewhere before. The guy hoists himself up onto the dock, no smile, and he’s tall, six-three or -four, giving them an expectant look, as if he’s been waiting there for them.
If it was up to him he’d just brush right by without a word, not What’s happening or Looks like rain or Fuck you, but Wilson takes it upon himself to be their ambassador of goodwill. “Nice day,” Wilson says, rolling his shoulders side to side and showing off his grin, all lips, no teeth, as if that much pure white enamel would blind anybody with its radiant power.
Still no reaction from the man in the teal shirt. Who just stands there, arms folded, as if he’s waiting for something, still waiting. His shoulders are narrow, his back slightly stooped. He looks to be in his mid-thirties, his face unlined and with something of the college frat boy in it, the tight cartoon slash of a mouth sketched in under the exaggerated nose that cants ever so slightly to the left, as if it’s been reshaped. Green eyes. Mud-colored hair, whipping round his head with the wind. And one more thing: a plastic nameplate, like cops wear, on the breast of his teal shirt. Sickafoose, it says.